Somehow or other, at all events, she made up her mind to bear more patiently the persecutions of the little Bruces, and, if ever her turn should come to be punished, as no doubt it would, whether she deserved it or not, to try to take the whipping as she had seen Alec Forbes take it.

Poor Annie! If it should come to that--nervous organizations are so different! At five, the school was dismissed for the day, not without another extempore prayer.

A succession of jubilant shouts arose as the boys rushed out into the lane.

Every day to them was a cycle of strife, suffering, and deliverance.

Birth and death, with the life-struggle between, were shadowed out in it--with this difference, that the God of a corrupt Calvinism, in the person of Murdoch Malison, ruled that world, and not the God revealed in the man Christ Jesus.